John Noble Wilford, a Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist for The New York Times who covered the Neil Armstrong-headlined first moon landing in 1969, passed away at his home in Charlottesville, Virginia. He was 92.
His niece, Susan Tremblay, told the NYT that the cause of Wilford’s death was prostate cancer.
‘MEN WALK ON MOON’
John Wilford gave the NYT readers an awe-inspiring and comprehensive account of Apollo 11’s touchdown and exploratory mission on the moon’s arid Sea of Tranquillity under the front-page banner headline “MEN WALK ON MOON,” on 21 July 1969.
“It was man’s first landing on another world,” he wrote, “the realisation of centuries of dreams, the fulfillment of a decade of striving, a triumph of modern technology and personal courage, the most dramatic demonstration of what man can do if he applies his mind and resources with single-minded determination.”
He added: “The moon, long the symbol of the impossible and the inaccessible, was now within man’s reach, the first port of call in this new age of spacefaring.”
John Wilford: Career
John Wilford, a Kentucky-born journalist, worked at The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine before joining The Times in late 1965. He, according to the NYT, combined a passion for scholarship with a detective’s eye for detail and the literary skills of a master storyteller.
Wilford’s journalism career spanned six decades, coinciding with milestone discoveries in the mysteries of dinosaurs and early human life, as well as in space exploration.
In 1965, Wilford was assigned his first major assignment for which he won a Time